Shroud of Shadow (16 page)

“He serves God.” Albrecht noticed that his protest sounded as uncertain as his bad knee.

“But he serves God to . . . hmmm . . .” Mattias mused. “How shall I say this? He serves God to show others, perhaps to show himself, just how much he serves God.”

“That doesn't . . .” It did. “. . . make sense, Mattias.”

Mattias laughed. “Oh, Excellency: we are human beings! God absolved us from making any sense after the tremendous farce in Eden!”

Albrecht blinked. “Be careful that Siegfried doesn't hear you talking that way, Mattias. I'd miss my chief clerk greatly.”

Mattias's tone abruptly turned somber. “My point exactly, Excellency. He is ambitious. His practice is as rigorous as that of the old hermits.”

Something about his clerk's choice of words made Albrecht uneasy. He thought again of the House of God. They . . . tortured people in there. True, the crime of a heretic was heinous enough to warrant torture, even death, but still . . .

Mattias continued. “But I have thought it wise always to remember that ambition can take one in either direction.”

“Heaven or hell?”

“Well . . . up or down. There have been many with ambition who have suddenly found themselves and all they have worked for ground into dust. By their own ambition. Or blown up by it as a town might be blown up with gunpowder.” Mattias shrugged: a rustle in the night. “Boom!”

“Boom,” said Albrecht, suddenly wrestling with his own conscience. Ambitious. Was he ambitious? How much pride did he take in his office and his title? Was the cathedral he so desired a tribute to God or to himself? He was suddenly uneasy. “Boom . . .”

“Exactly. Boom. The Wheel of Fortune takes one up, and it also casts one down. The highest Tower can be struck by lightning and laid low.” Another shrug, another rustle. “Boom.”

“You've been looking at heathenish pictures, Mattias.”

“All the better to serve God as best I can,” said the clerk. “If, because of what I know and what I think, Siegfried wants to call me heretical and kill me, then he will call me heretical and kill me. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that I can say or not say that will change his mind.”

Albrecht was once again disturbed. “I thought you said that Siegfried is a man of God.”

“I said also that he is ambitious,” said Mattias as though that explained everything. And, after a minute's consideration, Albrecht admitted that it did.

***

Natil awoke, picked sleep from the corners of her eyes with a long fingernail, tasted the musty palate of morning mouth. Still drifting half in and half out of a dream in which Hadden and Wheat floated in visions of starlight, she stared blearily at the walls of the tiny room that contained her tiny bed.

She could appreciate the symmetry: as the man and the woman became more elven, so she herself became ever more human. Only a week ago, she had slipped in and out of her slumbers as she might pass through a door. Now, though, her limbs were heavy, her mind clouded, her breath rank. An Elf? Still? Was she sure?

She stumbled naked to the basin and pitcher that stood on a table near the window, poured out, splashed her face. The smack of cold water brought her wits back. An inn. Belroi. The Aldernachts had made good time, and Francis, ever obsessed by propriety, had insisted that Natil (the only woman in the party) be given a room to herself.

The harper rubbed her eyes, stretched, yawned. Well, not exactly a room. More like a fair-sized cupboard. But at least she had been able to sleep without having to worry about groping hands, or about accidentally uncovering her ears when she braided her hair for the night or tossed and turned with her dreams.

Wrinkling her nose, she freed the braid from its clasp and unplaited it. As if anybody would think that the shape of her ears meant anything save deformity.

But she was remembering her dreams now, remembering Hadden and Wheat and what she knew to be the starlight that was steadily growing within them. Reality or fantasy? She did not know. She had seen George and Sally become Hadden and Wheat, had noted not only the beginnings of physical changes that, continuing, could not but lead to an elven appearance, but also had heard evidence of mental alterations to match. But dreams were as pliant as music, and as Natil could effortlessly shift a grief-stricken aeolian melody into a more bittersweet dorian, or even into a comparatively optimistic mixolydian, so her sleeping mind could just as easily have taken her hopes and her wishes and transformed them into visions that told her no more than what she desired to be told.

“Dear Lady,” she murmured. “I do not know. Is it from myself or from You that these visions come?”

And then she realized it: there was something missing from the tale of Hadden and Wheat. The Lady was missing. Hadden had seen the mountains, and Wheat had been transformed by an almost Eleusinian vision of Montana grain, but in none of it was any sense of the presence of
Elthia Calasiuove
.

But She was there. She had to be there. She
was
the mountains. She
was
the wheat. She was, in fact, the very being and substance of Hadden and Wheat themselves. But no . . . nothing. Nothing direct. In her dreams, Natil might well have been witnessing the awakening of the elven blood, but if that were so, then she was also seeing it awaken without a glimpse of its Creatrix; and from what she had deduced about the ethos and mindset of the future, Hadden and Wheat probably did not even suspect that She existed.

Dreams? Or reality? Her face still stinging from the cold water, Natil stood shocked at the utter humanness of her quandary. If her dreams were indeed no more than manifestations of her own wishes, then surely they could not but include the face of the Woman who was everything. That she saw nothing of the Lady argued most tellingly for the veracity of her visions. But that meant . . .

She covered her face.

. . . that Hadden and Wheat did not see. Might not ever see. Might not recognize even if they did see.

“O dear Lady . . . what has happened to us?”

Elthia
might come later, she reminded herself. That vision of immanence and of unconditional love might, heralded by other visions, other realizations, manifest eventually. It was not too late.

But then it all might still be a dream.

A tapping at the door. Natil realized that she had clenched her long hair in her fists. “Who . . . who is there?” she said, forcing calm into her voice.

“Just me, mistress,” came Harold's voice. “Come to wake you. We've a shorter ride for Furze than we did for Belroi, but Mister Jacob wants an early start.”

“Ah . . . certainly . . .”

“I've brought . . . breakfast.”

Perhaps it was her confusion, and perhaps it was that the starlight had been so long fled: regardless, she did not hear the catch in the shawm player's voice. Throwing a light shift on over her head, therefore, she went to the door, unfastened it . . .

. . . and Harold was suddenly pushing into the room, kicking the door closed behind him, clasping her about the waist. He drew her to him, held her fast, planted his lips firmly on hers. One of his hands was attempting to slide the gown from her shoulders.

Natil broke free of the kiss. “Let go of me.”

But the old, inhuman steel had been shaken out of her voice. Harold, doubtless, heard nothing more than the protest of an impatient woman. “Come now, Natil,” he said as he groped for her crotch, “you've been wanting this ever since we left Ypris. I could tell.”

He had gotten one of her shoulders bare, and now he applied his lips to its soft curve, bit delicately at her pale skin.

“I can tell,” he mumbled. “You're a woman just like any other. I know.”

And perhaps he did. Natil was suddenly struck with the fact that she was now included under the simple designation
woman
. No Elf-maid, no immortal, nothing non-human here. Just a woman. A woman whose fleshly desires, Harold had assumed, matched his own.

But if Natil had lost her heritage, and if that heritage had, in turn, lost the world, she could at least possess her own body. She grabbed the pouty shawm player by the hair and lifted, and Harold's eyes widened at the strength of her hand and arm.

“Perhaps, O man, you know women,” she said. “But you do not know me.”

He gave her a smarmy grin. “Awww. . . .”

Angered, she flung him against the closed door. He hit with a solid thud, and, eyes glazed, slid to the floor. “Natil . . .” he mumbled, persevering. “I . . . don't have time for games.”

Her foot met the side of his head, and he went sprawling. Natil grimaced more at her anger than at the impact. The stars were gone, the Lady was gone: perhaps, as had been the case once with Mirya, anger—stupid, human anger—was now all she had left.

Bending, she heaved Harold up off the floor and dropped him into a chair, then dashed the basin of cold water into his face. Wet, humiliated, faced with a woman he now knew could best him in any kind of an even fight, he simply stared at her. “Where . . . did you learn to do that?” he managed.

“An Elf taught me,” she said, and though she tried to remain angry, the emotion trickled out of her, leaving her numb, empty, hollow. Human anger, human sleep. What had become of the Elves? What had become of Natil?

“Oh . . . sure . . .”

“Is there . . .” She wanted to kick him again to ensure that there would be no repetitions of this incident. But she did not kick him. She simply stood in her shift, dripping with water from the backsplash, her fists balled and her damp hair falling lankly. She might have been any housewife in any city. Dear Lady!

“Is there any breakfast to be had in this . . .” She lifted a foot experimentally. He flinched away. “. . . brothel?”

“I'm sorry, Natil . . .”

“I am talking about breakfast. Is there? Master Jacob will not want to wait. I am pledged to the Aldernachts. I will keep my word.”

“Downstairs,” he mumbled, his face bright red where it was not bruised.

“Then get out and let me get dressed.”

He got to his feet shakily. “I really am sorry.”

She had turned away to find her clothes, but at his words she turned back. “You are sorry,” she said flatly, “because you did not succeed. Would you be so sorry if you were between my thighs at present?”

He was offended, shocked. “Certainly not!”

And so she did indeed kick him again. And to Harold's obvious astonishment, she cried afterward, because it had been such a human thing to do.

***

The Aldernacht house was a combination of the solidly burgher and the undeniably erratic. The former showed itself in plain furniture, businesslike windows, simple rugs, and unobtrusive stonework. The latter, though, manifested in the structure of the house itself, for the mansion sprawled involutedly across nearly an acre of ground (not counting the gardens, courts, stables, outbuildings, lawns, gazebos, ponds, and landscaping that lay behind the main structure), its separate and manifold compartments connected by a labyrinth of corridors and passages that Omelda found incomprehensible. Sent on errands, she would inevitably become lost within minutes, and after perhaps an hour of desperate searching, would at last find herself in an entirely different part of the house than that for which she had originally set out.

Old Eudes, dry as a dusty wardrobe, only nodded understandingly when he found her wandering in the fifth parlor (or was it the fourth?), a tiny tray of dragées in her hand and her eyes clouded not only with the chants of sext but with a more immediate bewilderment. “It happens,” he intoned, arching one of his moldings and curling up a drawer pull in what passed for a smile. “It always happens. You'd best take yourself back down to the kitchen and tell Martha to keep you there.” A flicker of a hinge. “You can learn the rest of the house . . . later.”

Nunc sancte nobis spiritus
was filling Omelda's head, but she fought to keep Eudes in mental focus. “You mean, this can . . . be learned?”

“Oh, it's a little . . . confusing,” said the steward. “Mister Francis has added a great deal to the old house, and he has . . . an intricate way about him. Most of us learned it as it was built; but give yourself a few years: you'll come to know it as well as . . . any.”

“A few . . . years?”

Eudes examined her as though she were a chair for which he had to find an appropriate place, at which time she would be glued, screwed, and nailed to the floor. Forever. “Mistress Omelda, your tenure here will be lengthy, I assure you. The Aldernachts take on only the best, and they do not let the best go . . . willingly.”

Omelda recalled the story of the runaway servant girl, and for the first time, she realized how tightly she had held to a small hope that, someday, healed of her affliction, the intrusive chant banished from her mind, she might be able to return to Shrinerock Abbey. Natil's promise to her had revitalized and fostered that hope. But Natil was gone, the chant . . .

Surrexit, ac Paraclito
. . .

. . . was very close, and now Eudes was, in effect, telling her that a return to Shrinerock was out of the question. Forever.

She suddenly wanted to tear off the Aldernacht livery, to run for the nearest door and blunder through the house like a sun-dazzled moth until she found an escape.

“Mistress Omelda?”

She passed a hand over her face. There was no escape, either from the chant or from the Aldernachts. “I'm sorry, sir. I'm . . . I'm just . . . giddy.”

Eudes nodded wisely, still examining the new chair for proper placement. Permanent placement. “I'll take you to the kitchen . . . myself.”

And as she followed him, her eyes cloudy with plainchant, Omelda felt a rising sense of panic. She had wanted a roof over her head, and she had gotten one: the roof of a cage, the roof of a tomb. She nodded at Eudes's explanations of the layout of the house, but the rooms, corridors, and passages all blurred with her whirl of fright.

They reached the kitchen. Martha was there, as usual, but there was present also a short, stout woman who stood on the scoured flagstones as though a heavy desk had been shoved out into the middle of the room. Her hair was tucked up severely beneath a cap in a style fifty years out of date, but what escaped to curl limply over her high forehead was as gray as the steel hairpins that attempted to push it back. This, Eudes explained in a whisper, was Madam Claire, Francis's wife.